General historical hand atlas, or General Historical Handbook, is the name of a historical atlas created by historian Gustav Droysen, published 1886. It contains 96 cards with explanatory text. It was published by the publishing house of Velhagen & Klasing under the direction of Richard Andree.
About Gustav Droysen
Gustav Droysen, full name: Johann Gustav Ferdinand Droysen, was born April 10, 1838 in Berlin, died November 10, 1908 in Halle. He was a German historian.
Droysen was the son of the much better known historian and university professor Johann Gustav Droysen and was of the Evangelical Lutheran denomination. Droysen first studied law in Jena and Berlin and from 1860 philosophy and history in Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1862.
In addition to his father, his academic teachers included Georg Waitz and Leopold von Ranke. After his habilitation in Halle in 1864 and an extraordinary professorship in Göttingen, he was appointed full professor in Halle in 1872, where he represented the subject of modern history until his retirement in 1902.
Droysen’s ‘General Historical Handbook’
In his work, he visualized on a map the empire of Tsar Samoil, colored in red. Droysen described the empire as: “Federation of the Slavic Hereditary Prince under the sovereignty of the Macedonian Samuel, 993-1018”.
In his work, he visualized on a map the empire of Tsar Samoil, colored in red. The empire is described as: “Federation of the Slavic Hereditary Prince under the sovereignty of the Macedonian Samuel, 993-1018“. The map is listed beside other maps on page 80, under the title “Balkan Peninsula and Ottoman Empire until 1699“.
Related post: How did Tsar looked like? You can find the answer here in our article!
In addition, the same map shows two more empires, as we can see in the legend of the map. Colored in orange, according to Droysen, it is visualized the “Bulgarian Empire under Symeon 917-927“. The “Bulgarian Empire of Peter and Boris 927-971” ist marked on the map in blue color.
The East Roman Empire (Oströmisches Reich), or as some in modern times use to say – the “Byzantine Empire”, is marked and colored in green.
In his handbook, Droysen also provides colored maps of “ancient Greece” (pages 6/7), about the “Greek history” (page 8), and the Empire of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great, the so called Alexander Empire (page 9).
Source: General historical handbook, ‘Allgemeiner historischer Handatlas’, 1886, page 80
